OutdoorAppDeveloper

Laptop GPU performance scores should be viewed with suspicion regardless of whether you are looking at a laptop with a RTX 3080 or a M1 Max. Apple highlighted the issue in their presentation. That heavy, hot, oversized $5000 Windows laptop with a top end desktop GPU may run fast when plugged into a wall socket (sometimes with two separate power supplies taking up two outlets) but on battery it runs extremely slowly and not for long. Being able to use the M1 Max at full speed for hours on battery while still getting near desktop performance is a game changer for mobile pros.

Too bad not many people are traveling these days. The thing I hear over and over again (and in my own case) is that these new MacBook Pros would be instant buys except that there is no need for them currently.

The M1 Pro and M1 Max are extremely impressive processors. Not only are the CPUs among the best in computer the market, the GPUs are the best in the laptop market for most tasks of professional users. A minor concern is that the Apple Silicon GPUs currently lack hardware ray tracing which is at least five times faster than software ray tracing on a GPU. Apple is likely working on hardware ray tracing as evidenced by the design of the SDK they released this year which closely matches that of NVIDIA's. Hopefully it will appear in the M2. The one area where the M1 Pro and Max are way ahead of anything else is in the fact that they are integrated GPUs with discrete GPU performance and also their power demand and heat generation are far lower. Not only does this mean that the best laptop you can buy today at any price is now a MacBook Pro it also means that there is considerable performance head room for the Mac Pro to use with a full powered M2 Pro Max GPU. That one could very well be the most disruptive processor to hit the market. It will be interesting to see how NVIDIA and AMD rise to the challenge.

Also note the 64 GB of vRam is unheard of in the GPU industry for pro consumer products. For some tasks, the new MacBook Pros will be the best graphics processor on the market. Better even than desktop computers.

I have been testing Windows for ARM on the M1 Mac Mini using Parallels over the past year. It works surprisingly well. The most impressive thing I have seen it do is to run Grand Theft Auto V with good frame rates and only very minor graphics glitches. This is not something I recommend doing as a game console will run rings around it but the fact that it is possible to run an extremely resource demanding game on a completely different processor architecture than it was designed for is impressive. It means that both Windows 11 ARM and Parallels are well designed. Parallels does run Windows 11 x86 just fine on x86 Macs.

Here are some of the issues you will run into (not had a chance to test Parallels 11.1 yet):
While Direct X is well supported in Parallels, you won't be able to run software that uses Vulkan or OpenGL. OpenCL GPGPU compute is not available either.
Microsoft still won't be able to match the performance of Rosetta which takes advantages of additional instructions on Apple Silicon.
While I was able to upgrade one of my VMs from Windows 10 Pro to Windows 11 Pro and retain the license. I don't see a way to transfer this license to Windows 11 ARM.
In Parallels 11.0, it was very difficult to move a VM from one computer to another if the virtual TPM was used. This is something that Parallels could fix in a future release.

Apple Computer: Nice products but you wouldn't want to work there.

iPhones would be extremely cool if Apple could find a way to allow creativity back into the app ecosystem. The iPhone was exciting in the first few years because every day there would be new amazing apps that did things no one had expected a smart device to do. There were apps that could listen to music and tell you what song it was. Another app looked at signs in different languages and turned them into English. There were highly addictive new games to play. Now all of that creative explosion is pretty much dead. The reason is that as soon as some new and exciting app becomes popular, like iDos for example, Apple kills it. Never mind that it had been in the App Store for years and got popular because it could run an extremely early version of Windows, it had violated the rules that Apple made up out of thin air and so had to die. Who is going to risk wasting years of their lives to produce an exciting new app in an ecosystem like that? No one that's who.

If Apple could carve out a space on the iPhone for risky apps to do risky things without access to the rest of the phone's data or iCloud, excitement could return to iOS. Oculus does this with the Quest. It has a separate app store for apps that are not quite ready to appear on the main app store or do things that Facebook is not yet comfortable with. The user takes the risk but the apps are there and some of them are wonderful. This will not happen on the iPhone because Apple's rules have very little to do with user safety. They are almost all about preserving Apple's control over the iPhone. The need for control is a kind of addiction for Apple's executives. Like other addictions, they are very harmful for both the addict and anyone around them. In this case, it is systematically killing the iPhone platform. Yes the new iPhones have nice new hardware features but when was the last time you bought an iPhone to get access to some amazing new app?